Maternity pay

[girlylala0807]

Hi all,

Im a bit confused about how much money I will be entitled to and for how long.

Im going on Maternity leave on the 1st of April 09, I am a student, i have been in my part time job for almost 2 years and i earn gross pay of around £95 a week.

Im not very good at understanding gov websites im afraid so if anyone can explain this to me in simple terms it would be great.

Thanks all.

xx

I forgot to add, I did have that job and another over the summer for about 3 months. I earned about 130 pound a week in that job and paid tax and insurance... will that count towards anything?

xx

you get smp (statutory maternity pay) for 39weeks - this starts when you decide to take mat leave or at 36weeks if you are signed off with a maternity related illness or if baby comes early before the date you've agreed. if I'm right SMP is just above your current weekly pay so you'll get £95 per week.

oh,the other job doesn't make any difference to mat pay. mat pay is based on average earnings in the qualifying period - think this is around weeks 23 to 25. so you are best doing loads of overtime in this bit to bump up earnings!

Ah,

Handy, I work in a shop, done with uni at start of December so lots of overtime over at Christmas.

Thank you.

xx

Girly have you seen this website, quite plain English and easy to understand, plus this page with more detail about statutory maternity pay.

SMP is 90% of average earnings for 6 weeks, then normally £117 for another 33 weeks. However as your earnings are below £117 you will continue to get 90% of your earnings for the whole period.

You need to be earning an average of £90 before tax, so you should be fine. The period your average earnings is worked out over is the 8 week period leading up to the 15th week before your due date.

So that means week 17 to week 25 of your pregnancy. So to increase the amount of SMP you will get you need to do a much as possible during that 8 week period.